Tahir H. Butt

PhD Candidate

Biography

I am a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the Urban Education program. My dissertation examines the policy of free tuition at the City University of New York in the postwar years. My research centers on how policy makers, administrators, alumni, and students understood a tax-supported system of public higher education. Their understanding is placed in the context of a tumultuous period of postwar economic restructuring, demographic changes, and the political contestation that reshaped local and state policy. The dissertation committee is chaired by Stephen Brier, the co-author of the recently published Austerity Blues.

Recent Posts

More historical archives are being digitized. Access to the digitized documents are limited to simple search interfaces. We can create tools to give scholars better ways to access the content. Unfortunately, the searchable content of documents is often of poor quality and unreliable. I illustrate how this is a problem for the case of my research on historical student newspapers and provide one solution to improving the quality of optical character recognition (OCR).

A recent study used decades of tax returns to determine how successful colleges have been at providing economic mobility to students. Among its many findings, CUNY colleges rated top in the nation in raising low income students into higher incomes. However, important differences within the CUNY system reflect how in fact uneven mobility is across the city’s public colleges.

I have been meaning to create a blog for some time now. A few weeks back, I had helped a friend set up her professional website on Squarespace. The end product is super slick and was easy to configure. The benefit, of course, with going this route would be that everything is handled for you, from creating the contents of the website to setting up the hosting.
Unfortunately, I tend towards masochism when it comes to computers.